The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (31 page)

The United States retains considerable ability to set the agenda and thereby confer legitimacy with regard to what constitutes a problem, crisis, or outrage. American ideas and ideals still dominate the debates over Darfur, Iranian nuclear weapons, and Burma. But Washington needs to understand that generating international public support for its view of the world is a core element of power, not merely an exercise in public relations. Other countries, peoples, and groups now have access to their own narratives and networks. They will not quietly accept the version of events handed down to them. Washington will have to make its case, and persuasively. This task has gotten more difficult, but it has also become more vital. In an increasingly empowered and democratized world, in the long run, the battle of ideas is close to
everything
.

The Bush administration never seemed to understand the practical value of legitimacy in the run-up to the Iraq War. American officials would contest the view that they were isolated by pointing to their allies in “new Europe,” Asia, and Africa—many of whom were bribed or cajoled into the coalition. And while the
governments
of Central Europe supported Washington, its people opposed it in almost the same numbers as in old Europe. Missing this distinction, Washington misunderstood Turkey, a long-standing and faithful ally that had become much more democratic over the 1990s. The government wanted to back the United States, but more than 90 percent of the Turkish people opposed it. The result, after a close parliamentary vote, was that Turkey could not support the United States—which meant the two-front war against Saddam became a one-front war, with serious drawbacks. At the start of the war, the United States had the support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. And while one might laud Tony Blair for his loyalty, one cannot expect most democratic politicians to ignore the wishes of vast majorities of their people.

Nationalism in a unipolar world can often become anti-American. How do you show that you are a staunch Brazilian, Chinese, or Russian patriot? By standing up to Mr. Big. In the 1970s, many of Indira Gandhi’s domestic policies were unpopular. Standing up to America, however, would always get a cheer on the campaign trail. Why? India was then as now fascinated by America and the American dream. But it was a sign of strength and courage that Mrs. Gandhi could assert herself against the hegemon. Americans complain that this is irrational, and that the country is unfairly turned into a punching bag. They are right. But get over it. There are many, many advantages to being a superpower. It has some costs as well. Those costs can be easily lowered by attentive diplomacy.

“It is better to be feared than loved,” Machiavelli wrote. It is a motto that Dick Cheney took to heart. In a 2007 speech, he quoted Bernard Lewis to the effect that, during the Cold War, Middle Eastern dictators learned that they should fear the Soviet Union but not America. Machiavelli and Cheney are wrong. Yes, the Soviet Union was feared by its allies, while the United States was loved, or at least liked. Look who’s still around. It is odd and unsettling that Vice President Cheney should cite enviously the thuggish and failed strategies of a totalitarian dictatorship. America has transformed the world with its power but also with its ideals. When China’s pro-democracy protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, they built a makeshift figure that suggested the Statue of Liberty, not an F-16. America’s image may not be as benign as Americans think, but it is, in the end, better than the alternatives. That is what has made its immense power tolerable to the world for so long.

Fear and Loathing

Before it can implement any of these specific strategies, however, the United States must make a much broader adjustment. It needs to stop cowering in fear. It is fear that has created a climate of paranoia and panic in the United States and fear that has enabled our strategic missteps. Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast and alone, preemptively and unilaterally, we have managed to destroy decades of international goodwill, alienate allies, and embolden enemies, while solving few of the major international problems we face. To recover its place in the world, America first has to recover its confidence.

By almost all objective measures, the United States is in a blessed position today. It faces problems, crises, and resistance, but compared with any of the massive threats of the past—Nazi Germany, Stalin’s aggression, nuclear war—the circumstances are favorable, and the world is moving our way. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt diagnosed the real danger for the United States. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he said. “Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” And he was arguing against fear when America’s economic and political system was near collapse, when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, and when fascism was on the march around the world. Somehow we have managed to spook ourselves in a time of worldwide peace and prosperity. Keeping that front and center in our minds is crucial to ensure that we do not miscalculate, misjudge, and misunderstand.

America has become a nation consumed by anxiety, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world now sees itself as besieged by forces beyond its control. While the Bush administration contributed mightily to this state of affairs, it is a phenomenon that goes beyond one president. Too many Americans have been taken in by a rhetoric of fear.

Republicans, in particular, resort to chest-thumping hysteria too often, especially when talking about Islamic terrorism. The former Massachusetts governor and presidential contender Mitt Romney, who bills himself as a smart, worldly manager, asked in 2005, “Are we monitoring [mosques]? Are we wiretapping?” The rhetoric got worse during the 2008 presidential campaign. “They hate you!” Rudy Giuliani repeatedly shouted on the campaign trail. He relentlessly reminded audiences of the nasty people out there. “They don’t want you to be in this college!” he warned a group of students at Oglethorpe University, in Atlanta. More recently, during the frenzy over the so-called Ground Zero mosque, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich compared moderate Muslims trying to build a community center to one of history’s greatest villains. “There is no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center,” he told Fox News in August 2010. “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.”

In his book Courage
Matters
, Senator John McCain took a far more sensible approach and wrote, “Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist. It’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave.” Writing in late 2003, he added what seemed like a sound rule of thumb: “Watch the terrorist alert and when it falls below yellow, go outside again.” Unfortunately, since 9/11 the alert has never dropped below yellow (which means an “elevated” level of risk from a terrorist attack). At airports, it has been almost permanently at orange—“high risk,” the second-highest level of alertness. Yet the Department of Homeland Security admits that “there continues to be no credible information at this time warning of an imminent threat to the homeland.” Since 9/11, only a handful of minor or incompetent terrorist plots have been uncovered in the entire country, and there is no example of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell having been found in America.

And still, the enemy—as many American politicians describe it—is vast, global, and relentless. Giuliani, for instance, casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. We are now repeating one of the central errors of the early Cold War—putting together all our potential adversaries, rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked each other, a fact that could be exploited to the great benefit of the free world. To miss this is not strength. It’s stupidity.

Some praise the Bush administration’s aggressive approach for preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil after 9/11. Certainly, the administration does deserve credit for dismantling Al Qaeda’s infrastructure in Afghanistan and in other countries where it once had branches or supporters—though that success has been more limited than many recognize. But since 9/11 there have occurred terrorist attacks in countries like Britain, Spain, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia—most of which are also very tough on terrorism. The common thread in these attacks is that they were launched by local groups. It’s easier to spot and stop foreign agents, far more difficult to detect a group of locals.

The crucial advantage that the United States has in this regard is that it does not have a radicalized domestic population. American Muslims are generally middle class, moderate, and well assimilated. They believe in America and the American dream. The first comprehensive poll of U.S. Muslims, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center, found that more than 70 percent believe that if you work hard in America, you get ahead. (That figure for the general U.S. population is only 64 percent.) Their responses to almost all questions were in the American mainstream.

This distinct American advantage—testament to the country’s ability to assimilate new immigrants—is increasingly in jeopardy. If American leaders begin insinuating that the entire Muslim population be viewed with suspicion, that will change the community’s relationship to the United States. Proposing to wiretap America’s mosques and comparing religious leaders to Nazis are certainly not steps in the right direction.

Though Democrats are more sensible on most of these issues, the party remains consumed by the fear that it will not come across as tough. During the 2008 campaign, its presidential candidates vied with one another to prove that they were going to be just as macho and militant as the fiercest Republican. In a South Carolina presidential debate in 2007, when candidates were asked how they would respond to another terror strike, they promptly vowed to attack, retaliate, and blast the hell out of, well, somebody. Barack Obama, the only one to answer differently, quickly realized his political vulnerability and dutifully threatened retaliation as well. After the debate, his opponents suggested that his original response proved he didn’t have the fortitude to be president. (In fact, Obama’s initial response was the right one. He said that the first thing he would do was make certain that the emergency response was effective, then ensure we had the best intelligence possible to figure out who had caused the attack, and then move with allies to dismantle the network responsible.)

We will never be able to prevent a small group of misfits from planning some terrible act of terror. No matter how far-seeing and competent our intelligence and law-enforcement officials, people will always be able to slip through the cracks in a large, open, and diverse country. The real test of American leadership is not whether we can make 100 percent sure we prevent the attack, but rather how we respond to it. Stephen Flynn, a homeland-security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that our goal must be resilience—how quickly can we bounce back from a disruption? In the material sciences, resilience is the ability of a material to recover its original shape after a deformation. If one day bombs do go off, we must ensure that they cause as little disruption—economic, social, political—as possible. This would prevent the terrorist from achieving his main objective. If we are not terrorized, then in a crucial sense we have defeated terrorism.
¹⁵

The atmosphere of fear and panic we are currently engendering is likely to produce the opposite effect. Were there to be another attack, two things can be predicted with near-certainty. The actual effects of the attack would be limited, allowing the country to get back to normal quickly. And Washington would go berserk. Politicians would fall over each other to pledge to pulverize, annihilate, and destroy . . . someone. A retaliatory strike would be appropriate and important—if you could hit the right targets. But what if the culprits were based in Hamburg or Madrid or Trenton? It is far more likely that a future attack will come from countries that are unknowingly and involuntarily sheltering terrorists. Are we going to bomb Britain and Spain because they housed a terrorist cell?

The other likely effect of another terror attack would be an increase in the restrictions on movement, privacy, and civil liberties that have already imposed huge economic, political, and moral costs on America. The process of screening passengers at airports, which costs nearly $5 billion annually, gets more cumbersome every year as new potential “risks” are discovered. The visa system, which has become restrictive and forbidding, will get more so every time one thug is let in. None of these procedures is designed with any consideration of striking a balance between the need for security and the need for openness and hospitality. The incentives are skewed to ensure that anytime, anywhere an official has a concern, he is better off stopping, questioning, arresting, and deporting.

I love the idea of bipartisanship. Just the image of Democrats and Republicans coming together makes me smile. “Finally,” I say to myself, “American government is working.” But then I look at what they actually agree on, and I begin to pine for paralysis.

In September 2010, the House of Representatives passed a bill with overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans. It would punish China for keeping its currency undervalued by slapping tariffs on Chinese goods. Everyone seems to agree that it’s about time. But it isn’t. The bill is at best pointless posturing and at worst dangerous demagoguery. It won’t solve the problem it seeks to fix. More worrying, it is part of growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States that misses the real challenge of China’s next phase of development.